Another organizational value – speed – followed the same path. Welch understood that speed is the key to competitive advantage. So, he abolished most central planning and involved people in the Change Acceleration Program (CAP) with the idea of making people open to change, hungry to learn and anxious to move quickly on new ideas. Participants come to CAP in teams of 8-12 with real problems. Each team worked with a coach who was constantly present and the contents altered between the CAP framework (guidelines and steps for change) and the solution of the problem.

Noel Tichy was responsible for setting up the now-legendary training center for GE at Crotonville. In his book “Leadership Engine” he describes the internal workings of Crotonville:

1. Leaders with a proven track record take responsibility for the development of other leaders

1. Leaders who develop others teach through their point of view with living stories in the areas of:
   1. Values – What behaviors are required to put our business ideas into practice?
   2. Ideas – How will we make money and win in the marketplace?
   3. Energy – How do we keep people motivated and working with high energy?
   4. Edge – Which difficult decisions must I make?

3. Because leaders are involved in developing others, they have well-defined methodologies and coaching and teaching methods.

According to Tichy, this approach succeeded because it involved the leadership of the company. This led to high expectations in the participants, cultural definition in the company, and strong tests and clarification in the leaders. All this resulted in a cultural dimension in learning which requires clear values and a stated vision that provides strength to development activities. Most learning happened on real projects (action-learning, 80-20 approach) and was geared to the right timing (career transitions) for max impact.

Overall, GE uses a number of well known tools to support their development. This distinguishing factor is the focused implementation and tie to organizational values. It is mostly about doing the best practices consistently and with excellence every time.

Another organizational value – speed – followed the same path. Welch understood that speed is the key to competitive advantage. So, he abolished most central planning and involved people in the Change Acceleration Program (CAP) with the idea of making people open to change, hungry to learn and anxious to move quickly on new ideas. Participants come to CAP in teams of 8-12 with real problems. Each team worked with a coach who was constantly present and the contents altered between the CAP framework (guidelines and steps for change) and the solution of the problem.

Noel Tichy was responsible for setting up the now-legendary training center for GE at Crotonville. In his book “Leadership Engine” he describes the internal workings of Crotonville:

1. Leaders with a proven track record take responsibility for the development of other leaders

1. Leaders who develop others teach through their point of view with living stories in the areas of:
   1. Values – What behaviors are required to put our business ideas into practice?
   2. Ideas – How will we make money and win in the marketplace?
   3. Energy – How do we keep people motivated and working with high energy?
   4. Edge – Which difficult decisions must I make?

3. Because leaders are involved in developing others, they have well-defined methodologies and coaching and teaching methods.

According to Tichy, this approach succeeded because it involved the leadership of the company. This led to high expectations in the participants, cultural definition in the company, and strong tests and clarification in the leaders. All this resulted in a cultural dimension in learning which requires clear values and a stated vision that provides strength to development activities. Most learning happened on real projects (action-learning, 80-20 approach) and was geared to the right timing (career transitions) for max impact.

Overall, GE uses a number of well known tools to support their development. This distinguishing factor is the focused implementation and tie to organizational values. It is mostly about doing the best practices consistently and with excellence every time.  

This morning I talked to an Australian sales guy in my office 2 minutes after breakfast. Now, I just mailed my boss in Canada and colleague in Luxembourg something. Reality these days for most people – and so we can enjoy the positive side of it. Focus more on results than business, cut on time on the road and see our children every now and then. But it does pose some challenges to team work – how do we know what the others are doing? How do we keep a sense of team?

Microblogging seems to be an avenue to explore. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook have gotten a lot of hype. Possibly too much play and 2.0-euphoria, but it might have some use for the distributed folks or those working from home. This is what I recently heard from a friend:

TWITTER – the simple way

• Set up a twitter channel for everyone in the group.
• Set the channel to private.
• Only add each other as followers.
• Everyone post once a day what they are working on.

Voila – you have your group updates. Maybe even more so than in offices next to each other.

WEEK NOTES and FACEBOOK – the personal way

A new thing happened to me today on the internet. Week notes – some people start posting weekly reflections on their work. Very valueable for he individual in reflecting on their successes and challenges. Sort of a public journal. It might be a bit too personal, but nontheless can foster a great way of catching a vibe from each other and promoting teaming.

• Setup a profile on facebook that is for your work relations
• Add each other as friends
• Once a week, post your weekly reflections
• Comment on each other’s postings

Some folks migh be uncomfortable with Facebook’s reach and private nature.

TUMBLR – the third way

• Set up a tumblr account
• Set up your own tumblr
• Add an additional tumblr blog
• Password protect it
• Add members from your team
• Allow them to post into the blog
• Post weekly or daily updates

This might be the best way to combine the speed of twitter with private settings and flexible posting options.

Communication does need some thinking. A lot of places possibly resist home office or distributed work for the lack of control or information that they perceive. These apps can help and we’ll see where they take us. In the future, we will probably work more and more from the places we like than taking long commutes to stuffy, expensive offices.

Except – it didn’t really work. I did a study once before a rollout of a new elearning offering was planned. A test access was given to 30 people. Within 3 months they could test and evaluate. Results: no one finished a course. Rating on a scale from 1-5: 2.1 (5 being great). Why?

I think elearning 1.0 was too static. Initially it was text-based, later audio came along, then video. Most case studies were lame. Most exercises trivial. There were a lot of multiple-choice options in there. I took a course in a subject I was somewhat proficient in. I couldn’t pass most multiple-choice things, because they were asking for a definition which I really didn’t care about. (It reminded me of growing up bi-lingual. I had to take English classes in school which I already knew. I sucked at grammar even though I could speak better than the teachers. I was good at practice, not good at theory). Now, there is a case for theory, but come on– what knowledge workers need to know can very rarely be boiled down to multiple-choice formats.

There was one great online-course I did. Peter Drucker’s stuff on Corpedia (disappeared by now). It was basically a series of insights by Peter Drucker and then very open questions for self-reflection (plus that great Austrian accent of Peter). That course was engaging and actually really helpful. But it lived from Peter Drucker’s insights and brilliance, as well as the restrained from that “testing” nonsense.

Here comes Facebook. Great learning is about great theory and great interaction. No better tool than Facebook for that. Here is a scheme I have seen recently that I benefited more than even from the Drucker course. This was the steps in the course:

1. kick-off call – everyone was invited to an opening call with the goals and methods used.

2. lecture – provided with itunes U, it was an mp3 (or video) with about an hours worth of lecture

3. reflection – a hidden group in facebook with a new question posted every week on the lecture. People had 250 words to answer (kiss).

4. interaction – we had 2-3 days to respond to other posts

5. summary – the teacher read all posts and comments and did a video-summary. This was posted in the Facebook group as well.

6. project – at the end of the 4 weeks, we did a learning project. Create something and do some kind of transfer.

7. final call – a final phone conference to tie things up.

In addition, there was one book to read, as well as two supporting books for who wanted to go deeper. Also, where possible people were encouraged to meet in person to discuss their insights (which we did and benefited from a lot).

Great new learning. Why? Interaction. Real, meaningful interaction. That is what elarning 1.0 lacked. Of course, it doesn’t scale as well and it limits the flexibility. But it seems that elarning is finally moving on and getting some real development. Most tools are free. No need for elaborate platforms. I’m interested in seeing how this plays out in the future.

1) What is our mission? – what a great question to focus what you are all about. While it might seem easy, it usually is not. Try letting people write down their understanding of the mission and it becomes clear that a clear mission is a lot of work. It also cuts right at the question on how to react to change inside and outside of the organization.

2) Who is our customer? – Peter Drucker recommends to look at 2 types of customers. The typical customer who buys the services or products. And then the internal customer that you need to deliver those. Like employees. Only through good understanding of your target will the organization be focused.

3) What does the customer value? – what do customers want. Now that always seems obvious, but working in an organization it is easy to overshoot the market, to deliver non-essentials and loose essentials. It requires constant renewal to focus on the costumer’s value and not just through study, but through going there and feeling their pain.

4) What are our results? – focusing on outputs. Another great question for a team. While this also seems trivial, I hardly see any organization that agrees on this. Top management overestimates the understand of the employees and if there is little agreement on this, there is a lot of waste.

5) What is our plan? – out of all the first questions you bild the plan.

“The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask,” – Peter Drucker - .

Applied to Obama’s campaign: Obama’s Drucker-style win (business week)

- Not process driven
- Collaborates with broad network of friends and colleagues
- Intermingled personal and work lives
- Needs information even when not at her desk
- Tends not to be patient

Basically, self-directed innovators want to get a job done. They don’t want to be busy, but productive. This is a great attitude, but it poses some problems for organizations. These are usually run from a central command structure and try to manage the landscape through processes. But this excactly frustrates this new class of worker: feeding an organizational hunger for reporting and compliance. Big organizations don’t seem to be a good place for self-directed innovators.

What would need to change? I think we need a shift along the axis of control & accountability. With the focus on processes, organizations tend to be high in control and low on accountability (you are responsible for compliance and business). If an organization could focus more on high accountability and low on control (responsible for outcomes and value), then it would really move towards a „network of brains“. Too often, initiative is tied to titles and stiffles the creativity and ownerhsip of employees beyond their own cubicle. Anyway, without being too much rock’n’roll here I think Google is on to something.

I have mentioned in a previous post that experience and standing is very important in impacting from an HR point. That takes time and, well experience. I was lucky to be linked to some experienced HR folks and tried to learn what I can from them.

Beyond that I have gotten together with some other HR peers that share my view and would like to look beyond. So we put together a CoachingOurselves set for HR. We followed Dave Ulrich’s framework on the role of HR and identified 15 topics that we would like to discuss. It works quiet nice and engages us in some good discussions.

Finally, I asked some business professors that I came across in our strategy trainings what they recommend. Besides coaching skills, they came up with the following reading list:

Peter Block – flawless consulting
This is a great book for the process of consulting and how to cover the various aspects of working as a contractor to solve problems. It took me quite a while to go through it and helped with good advice on various stages.

David Maister – the trusted advisor
This book addresses the various stages from a relationship angle and shows activities for each of them. It is a good resource for thinking through the various aspects of working with managers.

Barbara Minto – The pyramid principle
Most consultants recommended this book. It talks about how to structure thoughts, problems and presentations and has become invaluable to me. Also a slow read, but very helpful since people appreciate clear thoughts.

Peter Senge – the fifth discipline
I have avoided this one for long now. Too popular so I wondered how good it can be. When it was recommended in this context, people highlighted the systems thinking aspect. I am a big believer in this (“poets are the original system thinkers”) since most problems seem to me systemic in my daily experiences.

This is just a quick starter on the way. The tug between admin and consulting remains, but it might be time to build the skills since chance favors the prepared.

It seems sort of simple that output is more important than input. Somehow it slips the attention in most cases though that not all input is created equal. Some activities are huge on generating results and others are huge on effort with little connection to what you want to reach. The Pareto Principle is so common that most people ignore it, just like the picture of the kids on the fridge.

These days I am wondering why output-thinking is so rare, especially in HR. Is it that it takes the output is unclear? The first task might be to think through what would actually count. And since this is really non-trivial, people end up looking going with whatever inputs they find nice and fitting. So much HR KPIs I have seen are pure activity: number of transactions, number of calls handled, participation rates in whatever, feedback in a I-liked-it format.

Take the case of 360°-Feedback. Why are you doing it? Couldn’t the most effects be reached with simple, frank conversations? What’s the point of spending countless hours placing clicks on unclear dimensions and hundreds of dollars just to find out you need to listen more?!

Sure, HR doesn’t have the single focus of a bottom line as sales does. It is real fuzzy and complicated to find your focus. But if you don’t know your output, you will fall back to activity focus which leads to ineffectiveness and a frustrating work experience. Translate: high cost, smart people go elsewhere.

So one of the first issues for HR is to figure out what the output is. This is actually the first issue of everything that needs to be done (for example for your blog and posts, or in coaching). If you don’t your GPS will stay focused on activity and Pareto will be your worst friend.

• Dollars or people
• Outsourcing or not

With these two trends the authors sketched 4 scenarios for HR in 2015:

Scenario One: Say It with Numbers
Assumptions: Organizations are ruthless about demanding a return on their human capital investments. Only the most repetitive, non-value-added transactions are outsourced.

Scenario Two: The Ambassador
Assumptions: Organizations recognize relationships as critical to success. The company holds the reins of most HR functions, and outsourcing is minimal.

Scenario Three: Two Heads Are Better Than One
Assumptions: HR is under pressure to ensure that human capital investments provide a solid return. The use of HR outsourcing has risen significantly.

Scenario Four: Relationships Are a Risky Business
Assumptions: Organizations renew their efforts to capitalize on relationships, both within and external to the business. HR outsourcing is used widely to deliver HR services.

Now, all that sounds to me like a decision whether HR will be a champion of people or process. The processsignal-approach to HR is in search of The Mighty Dashboard, squeezes the dollar on human-ROI and centralizes as much as possible. Low costs are certainly a plus. The question is whether growth can be gained by minimizing costs. The peoplesignal-approach realizes the we live in a liquid world where the best solutions are local and growth is fueled by strategic people investments. It seems that in the last years there was a big emphasize on the process quality of HR. The problem with the Big Master Plan approach to HR was nicely put in a recent study on how to measure an HR strategy:

Every business has its own strategic priorities, with unique HR implications and requirements; we could not identify a meaningful universal “template” for measuring HR’s business contributions.

Why is there no meaningful universal template? Maybe because there can’t be one. HR played too long on the wrong side of the field, the field in search of universal solutions. If Talent Management is mainly seen as a process instead of a relationship then it is no wonder that companies get into a war for talent and can’t control their people costs. Maybe we listened too much to the wrong signals. Maybe it’s time to tune in to more peoplesignals.

I heard those questions quiet a bit recently. People seem a bit disillusioned at handling Excel and PowerPoint all day in order to excel in the company and powerup their career. It seems like the currency of what people look for is changing a bit. Big companies used to offer stability, variety, safety and options. With that comes a hefty dose of politics, reporting, inefficiencys, nonsense. Companies themselves seem to cancel some of the very reasons people work there: safety doesn’t hold anymore (jobs going east, struggling for survival) and stability is a joke (who has the same manager for more than a year these days?). Along with long hourse and a frustrating limited scope of what you actually can do, it is fair to ask: is it worth it? The new currency seems to be time and flexibilty. There are a number of books and articles taking up this thought.

Tim Ferriss – to live like a millionaire, you don’t need a lot of money

Tim‘s book The Four-Hour Workweek beats the drum to escape 9-5 and fulfill your dreams. His assumption is that a lot of work is unnecessary, that it could be managed much better and that you can do a lot with little money. (Actually, the hard part is knowing what to do if you are not caught up in seemingly important work projects.) He calls for a liberation from the constraints of the office. If you are not at your desk, you can be more effective, or outsource your job altogether. That boots your options in time and location.

Daniel Pink – free agent nation

Free Agent Nation was published 10 years ago – at the dawn of the bubble. Some statements sound very pre-bubblish, but the trend has being going for a while: why invest in a stale corporate environment when you have the smarts to be more flexible and work on what you want? “In free agency,” the beat of the free agents goes “people assume their own shape rather than fit the shape of some corporate box.”

Holm Friebe – digital bohemia

A German book (“wir nennen es Arbeit“) that shoots against fixed employement in favor of a digital lifestyle of small collaborative teams on the move. Sounds a bit Jack Kerouck-ish. Young people need their ideals and rebellion. But it does indicate a bigger point: why not be with the work I like at the time I like at the place I like?

The answer might be the paycheck. As any free agent finds that is not in demand – it kind of sucks to be out of money and options. Probably a lot of people who ventured off into the dreamland of doing their own thing came back to the comfort of a big corporation with company car, health insurance and days off for vacation.

I still think the trend is the quest for something more. Especially talented people are aware that the company needs them more than they need the company. With the limited budgets in the Western countries, you can’t forever raise the income of your stars (and btw: the middle 80% is what make the business tick). So what can companies do? What can HR offer? I think it would be worth a try to offer the benefits of a free-agent-lifestyle (like free location, free times) with the benefits of a corporation (paycheck, insurance, vacation). Focus on outputs and leave it up to the semi-free people to figure out how they get the work done. Sure, communication might be an issue, but is it not anyways? Which company does really have a no-waste meeting culture? Where can you really focus and get quality work done between 9 and 5?

Maybe it would be the brave new world of collaboration. In The Compensation Handbook by Berger & Berger they highligh a number of trends that affect compensation and fit within this vein: people are more open to risk and seek self-employment; people choose jobs to support personal development opportunities and to support their personal lifestyles; the invisible paycheck becomes more important than the visible; the global workforce move closer and collaborates. Maybe it’s time for HR to think through this.